Supply chains are for carrying and moving goods from one place to several other places in the world with multimodal means by promising requesting parties (payers) to provide a specific service, knowing as precisely as possible, at any time, the status of the specific service ordered and reliably achieving the specific service. In this field, services are specified with several kinds of data including: origin and destination locations, parties, kind, quantity and conservation prescription of goods, delivery date and conditions, quality requirements, traceability requirements, etc.
In the field of carrying and moving goods, traditional systems manage services separately according to their respective transportation domain. These transportation domains could be: Container services, Truck Load (TL), Less Than Truck Load (LTL), logistic & brokerage and others means as fleet maintain labor management, geodesic and GPS tracking. Traditional systems cannot manage globally interchanging or shifting means of transportation. This involves increasing time and risk of error to consolidate traceability of goods when many transportation means are used. Moreover, traditional systems cannot optimize the utilization of common resources available to such services. Common resources could be trucks and trailers, locations in terminals, fleet, and other resources.
In the field of carrying and moving goods, traditional systems manage different steps as well as transportation domains separately beginning with submitting quotations and ending with invoicing orders. The first step consists generally in answering clients requesting information about their order in progress or submitting quotations to the clients or taking orders. This first step is generally managed by a first system specialized on the client relationship. The second step consists in regulating the traffic for achieving transportation orders. The last step consists in collecting information about an order and invoicing it according to standard practices. Each step needs new manual and independent entries with specific information and mainly into separate systems, per transport segment (container, LTL, or VL). Such multiple entries consume time, increase the risks of errors and delays invoicing.
Another characteristic of traditional systems in the field of carrying and moving goods is the asynchronous report of execution steps and the asynchronous instruction transmittal. Most of time, the reporting of deliveries is collected one or more days later when the operator returns to the office. These differences between reality and status in the database prevent the simulation of the best combination to react to an event or to promise a service to a client. The computed schedule is already wrong as soon as it is set. On the other hand, most of time, operators receive instructions on the phone without keeping a paper trail. Oral instructions cause several errors in executing the plan.
Another characteristic of traditional systems in the field of carrying and moving goods is the excessive amount of time for simulating transportation solutions. One the phone, clients cannot wait several minutes to receive a realistic quotation. In these kinds of cases, for the purpose of taking the order immediately, the quotation must be submitted immediately, within a single minute.